Customer Relationship Management

As you already know, customer relationship is so important that you can increase your profit both in a short-term and long-term. Hospitality is one of the most important matter when you start selling your service.

As you consider the Customer Relationship Management (CRM), it can be classified into two categories. Customer Service and Customer Experience. By properly understanding the two different methods, it will help you to tie a rigid alliance with your customer.

Customer Service

Customer service is generally a one-time communication hub. Such as a chat function, you can talk to the official customer service person to fix it when the problem occurs. As a shop owner, it will be very important for you to understand a workflow to build a effective customer service.

① List Up

When you start responding to customer’s voice, you will notice the setbacks where your customers are straggling. The major negative feedback is the one which should be on the list to be fixed. By conducting primary research, (please check the article on Marketing Research to learn more about it) you can properly find the way to list up the problems.

② Create Solution Template

On each negative feedback, you have to have a solution to fix it. Once the solution is ready, let’s make solution templates to share.

Examples
● Instruction: Prepare a instruction guide and upload it on your website.
● How-To Video: Create a short video content and send a link to anyone.

③ Measure and Improve

By frequently checking the performance of your customer service, you can improve the relationship to your customers. Without this auditing the workflow, your customer service would never get better, or even worse, you will be losing your fans. Let’s have a time to review your feedback lists and solution contents every once in a while.

Customer Experience

In contrast, customer experience basically is a long-time relationship. Not only like one-time help, it needs to have strategic plan for storytelling. As you learned Branding or Niche Marketing in the previous chapter, the customer experience is closely linked to the process of interaction between you and your customer when establishing a brand image. To improve the customer experience, I will suggest the following tips to keep in mind.

①Be interactive.

Interactive communication is closely related to a personal experience. When you are open to your customer, your customer gets also open to you. Let’s prepare some platforms to interact.

● SNS : Nowadays, social networking sites(SNS) are the most popular place to show your thoughts and interact to your customer. Be wise to choose which SNS platform to start and be open to each of your customer. If you want to know more detail about SNS marketing, please see the session, Social Media Marketing.
● Event : Even you are online business, showing it on local place is very important to interact with your customers. Let’s have a booth on local bazaar and show your products. Your customer can touch and feel it. They will give you an important feedback right at spot. Face-to-face communication is always as important as the online communication.

②Be consistent

Consistency is one of the most important factor on your storytelling. As long as you maintain the brand image in a right direction, the customer can recognize you well. Be careful on what you stating on each media platform. Have a simple concept and don’t change the fundamental idea so often. Then, your customer get more confident and trustful on you.

The Key to Success

Lastly, the most important lessons on customer relationship are to be quick and frequent.

Most of the main criticisms against your service would come when you are late and inconsistent. All of those mentioned above is related to your quick and rigid response. Be quick to say hi. Be quick to thank. Be quick to apologize. Be quick to fix. Be frequent to update. Be frequent to promote.

Customer relationship cannot be build in a day. No matter what, criticism would happen. Just be patient and keep smily face anytime, then follow the customer relationship strategy you created. Keep being active and being honest. Be polite and stay tuned in a happy voice. Eventually, the customer will start trusting you.